Artists Of Sky: Benton Exhibition Showcases Beauty, Scientific Importance Of Clouds

If an artist took a paintbrush, dipped it in white, and painted the Earth's atmosphere from space, the result might look a lot like the deck of stratocumulus clouds over the Pacific Ocean as seen in photographer Michael Light's archival project of the Apollo lunar missions.

One could say the photo of that particular cloud deck - featured in the latest exhibition at the William Benton Museum of Art – looks more like glaciers or a patch of scales over the atmosphere, but to George Matheou, it almost literally looks like the stroke of a paintbrush.

"Stratocumulus are thin sheets of clouds that form close to the Earth's surface," Matheou explains. "When you get a lot of them, they cool the planet very effectively. Because the clouds are white and bright, they reflect much of the solar radiation out to space and keep it from warming the ocean. It's like painting the surface of the Earth with a reflective coating."

As far as global warming is concerned, scientists including Matheou say, the more stratocumulus clouds the better.

"But as the atmosphere and ocean warm, those clouds are becoming fewer, and that tends to make the situation even worse, because as you warm, you remove natural cooling at the same time, which accelerates the warming," he says.

When Matheou, an associate professor in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering within the College of Engineering, looks around at any of the photographs on display in "Clouds: A Collaboration with Fluid Dynamics," he often thinks about such scientific things.

As the impetus for the exhibition, however, he also looks around and simply appreciates the silver lining in the very thing he studies.

Even Small Changes Are Significant

Sure, when Matheou was a young boy, he lay on the ground, staring at the sky, and found shapes in the clouds. He wondered what being a pilot would be like, and what would it feel like to fly through a cloud shaped like a penguin?

Fast-forward to the present day, and Matheou, winner of a 2022 National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award, looks up and thinks about how climate scientists need to predict cloud formation with near perfection because being even 3% off could mean the difference between - well, life and death.

"Clouds are the system that supports life on the planet, yet they're the largest uncertainty in climate projections," he says. "Small changes in the Earth's cloudiness can affect global temperature by a lot. Our goal is to understand how cloud systems work, especially as the climate warms and the clouds change."

For the culmination of his NSF award, Matheou worked with Benton Executive Director Nancy Stula, who curated the exhibition, to blend art and science for a general audience, breaking down for visitors the significance of his larger project, "Understanding Low-Cloud Feedbacks Using Large-Eddy Simulation of Spatially Developing Cloud Transitions."

Art is not just for studio art majors, it's for everyone. — Nancy Stula, Benton Executive Director

Stula chose photographs for the show, rather than paintings, if only to depict them in the most scientifically accurate way possible, she says.

Visitors are greeted by photographer Kate Cordsen's "Indigo" juxtaposed against "White Branches, Mono Lake, Cloud Reflections, CA" from Ansel Adams – a small placard nearby, written by Matheou, explaining how fluid dynamics relates:

"Fluid dynamics is concerned with how everything that flows, flows," it says. "Scientists and engineers study fluid motions to understand and predict biological and natural systems."

But how does that relate to clouds?

"Have you ever seen a plane leaving a white line behind it? That's a manmade cloud called a concentration trail, or contrail," Matheou explains. "The jet engine burns fuel, which creates water vapor that goes into the atmosphere. If the humidity is high enough, the water vapor condenses and becomes either liquid or solid. A contrail is vapor that has become little ice crystals.

"Fluids are gases and liquids, like the contrail," he continues. "Mathematically, there's a set of equations that describe how fluids move. If you solve the equations, you figure out what's going to happen. But you cannot solve these equations by hand. You need a computer to do that, and we have a specialized computer, probably the size of this art gallery, to help us solve these equations."

What he, as head of UConn's Computational Fluid Dynamics Group, is trying to do is answer simple questions that have complicated mathematical expressions, never mind answers – like, if the ocean warms by 1 degree, will the clouds above it become thinner? And, if so, by how much?

Science Can Be Beautiful, Too

Matheou stands in the Benton gallery looking at six photographs from artist Helen Glazer on display.

"This is a cumulus cloud, or the remnant of one. Those are the small, puffy clouds that develop near the ground. It's a liquid cloud, so the white you see are liquid droplets, like in the winter when you breathe out and you can see white. It's the same kind of liquid droplets," he says, pointing at one image.

Stula redirects him across the room to one of the Sebastião Salgado pieces that looks like a gigantic mushroom sprouting toward the heavens from the Earth's surface.

"It's one of the big thunderstorms you get in the tropics," Matheou says. "The cloud is condensing water from the very bottom to the top, up 10 miles into the atmosphere. The more the water goes up, the cloud fills and becomes ice crystals. When they become big, they fall faster out of the cloud."

That's a bit of what's also happening in "Hurricane Gladys Over the Gulf of Mexico #16" from Light's Apollo project that shows the spiral of hurricane clouds in 1968.

"These are basically big thunderstorms, organized together," Matheou explains. "They grow tall and hit what we call the tropopause, which is the topmost part of the atmosphere called the troposphere where all the weather is confined. Above the tropopause, the atmosphere is much warmer, so weather can't go in it. When the thunderstorms near the center of the hurricane hit the tropopause, the clouds spread horizontally, and that's why this middle part looks like a cloudy disk."

Matheou can narrate his way through an exhibition like this, but he says he never imagined he'd be among the artists on display.

His "Large-eddy simulation of cumulus clouds" video shows on a loop in a small room off the main exhibition space, giving those who pause for a few minutes to watch the feeling of flying like a bird or a plane through the clouds.

Yes, the simulation is beautiful, transfixing even.

It's also scientifically accurate, he notes.

"It took a lot of computing to create this," he says. "These are the actual simulations we do for our research. All of these are simulated on the computer by solving a complex set of equations run through the very big computer we have here on campus. It's a scientific model that computes radiation in the atmosphere. We just used it in a creative way."

Matheou says he and his team programmed the computer to fly inside the clouds, and each frame in the video takes several hours for the computer to produce using its 60 processors. Oh, and there are about 600 frames in each of the video's three segments.

It took about a month to produce.

Matheou stresses the video isn't like the graphics one would see in a video game or movie, as those aren't necessarily faithful to science. His video shows the exact formations that cloud deck would take in nature over about 45 minutes, through the clouds' birth, development, active phase, and dissipation.

It's a project that earned Matheou the American Physical Society's Gallery of Fluid Motion contest in November 2021 and later exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

"Art is not just for studio art majors, it's for everyone," Stula says.

Matheou agrees, "We want people to realize that artists, engineers, and scientists use a little bit of the same thought process. We just label something as art or as engineering, but it's just a label. The way people think, create, and communicate on a fundamental level is the same. I want people to start making these connections, especially our students who are going to create and work in the world in the future."

"Clouds: A Collaboration with Fluid Dynamics" is on display at the William Benton Museum of Art through Dec. 14.